Tom Cruise is Back to Being a Lunatic in New Mission Impossible: Fallout Trailer

Now he can add helicopter stunt pilot to his resume

By now, you probably know that Tom Cruise is a legend in Hollywood circles when it comes to performing his own stunts. The man has as much use for stuntmen as I have for a box of potpourri. In his last two Mission Impossible movies alone, Cruise scaled the Burj Khalifa in Dubai and held onto the side of an airplane as it took off. Oh, let’s not forget about the car chase in Jack Reacher, the motorcycle chase in Knight and Day, and the unforgettable samurai sword-fight scene in The Last Samurai that almost resulted in Cruise losing his actual head.

It comes as no surprise then that when the trailer for Mission Impossible: Fallout debuted during Super Bowl LII, we get a good look at some of Cruise’s latest death-defying stunts. The two-and-a-half-minute trailer had everything. It had Cruise in a head-on collision with a truck. It had him climbing another mountain similar to his MI2 stunt. And for good measure, there’s another motorcycle chase scene, this time on what looks to be the very busy streets of Paris.

As terrifying as those stunts are, none of them compare to Cruise’s latest stunt tour de force, which involved piloting a helicopter on his own and performing 360-degree spiral maneuvers as the helicopter hurled towards the ground. The stunt was so unique — and dangerous — that it actually earned its own behind-the-scenes video. If you think there’s something unnatural about Cruise’s stunt in the helicopter, you’re sorely mistaken. That’s Cruise performing the stunt by himself after receiving a six-month crash course on how to fly a chopper. That’s dedication to the highest of high levels.

Or as stunt coordinator Wade Eastwood said, “It’s super important for a movie like Mission to be doing it all practically and for real. Tom doesn’t want to sit in a green screen. The audience can tell when something’s been cheated.”
I certainly don’t feel cheated after watching the video.